Berlin, Germany

Finally getting around to posting about our 3 days in Berlin. Photos HERE.

The first morning, we walked around the city and looked at all the local shops and the graffiti-covered walls. Berlin is covered in graffiti (which I think is great, Emily does not always agree)! More on the graffiti below. That afternoon, we took a free 1/2 day tour which turned out to be fantastic, even if we nearly froze to death. We saw the sight of (and a memorial for) one of the Nazi book-burnings, Berlin´s individually numbered public trees (they counted every single tree in the city at one point?!?), "Checkpoint Charlie" (one of the checkpoints to pass to/from East Berlin ((communist)) to West Berlin ((non-communist))), Hitler´s bunker (a now intentionally-empty patch of ground next to an apartment´s parking lot), the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2700 rectangular granite stones of varying heights and angularity spaced evenly on a grid and very eerie to walk through while thinking about what they stand for), a bank whose interior was designed by the same architect who did the EMP in Seattle and finally the Brandenburg Tor, the column-esqe structure with a horsed-chariot atop it that Napolean once stole on his way through Berlin). Later, we went and checked out the observation deck in the giant glass globe atop the German Parliament building, allowing us views of the entire nighttime city-scape.

The next day we went to an outdoor exhibit built on the former grounds of the Nazi SS headquarters during WWII, and then tried to find a museum about the Stasi (the secret police of communist East Germany), but failed, and ended up just eating some delicious Borschtscht soup at some little hole-in-the-wall restaurant (rest assured Colleen, your´s tastes every bit as delicious!).

Our third day in Berlin, we checked out the East Side Gallery, which is a 1.3 km piece of the Berlin wall still standing that was decorated by graffiti artists in 1990. There was some truly amazing art on this wall. There are several pictures in the linked album from here.

The next day, we were off to Prague, in the Czech Republic.

Berlin was great, and although we didn´t go to one of Berlin´s all-night Techno clubs, I still we think we did it big!